Author-cook stresses ratios rather than recipes

Do you blindly follow recipes, afraid that one change or misstep will ruin a dish?

Do you get irritated by having to go back and forth from a cookbook to the stove a dozen times just to get dinner on the table?

If you are a slave to the written recipe, Michael Ruhlman wants to set you free.

And he sets out to do that in “Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking” (Scribner, $26).

In “Ratio,“ Ruhlman seeks to simplify the kitchen lives of home cooks.

The heart of the book is 31 ratios for such common preparations as bread, cookies and mayonnaise.

Knowing these ratios isn’t everything. For starters, ingredients whose proportions can vary aren’t included in the ratios. So the bread ratio covers flour and water. Yeast, which can vary according to the type of bread, and salt, which can vary to taste, are absent. Also missing are any nonessential flavoring ingredients such as herbs or nuts.

Perhaps the biggest deterrent to using these ratios for the home cook is that most of them are by weight. So you’ll need a scale. Ruhlman has a reason for this: A cup of flour can weigh 4 to 6 ounces, so it would be easy to distort the ratio if measuring by volume.

Some ratios can be expressed in volume, though, and Ruhlman does include a few shortcuts, such as knowing that a large egg weighs two ounces.

Of course, a ratio won’t produce a perfect loaf of bread without technique. So some cooking knowledge and common sense must be applied to every ratio. Every ratio in the book is accompanied by a regular recipe and full details on how to turn a ratio into sausage, pie dough, crepes and more.

Still, the ratios are a heck of a starting point. They can help you become a better cook by revealing the interconnectedness of different preparations. They also can allow you to get more creative. “When you know a culinary ratio,“ Ruhlman said, “it’s not like knowing a single recipe, it’s instantly knowing a thousand.“

Here are some of Ruhlman’s ratios. Beginners will need to consult a cookbook at first for help combining the ingredients, and to know what to add to these essential ingredients. Unless otherwise stated, all the ratios are by weight. Also, the ratios list ingredients by the order in which they typically are used in a recipe.

Pie Dough: 3 parts flour, 2 parts fat, 1 part water

Cookie Dough: 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, 3 parts flour

Pancake batter: 2 parts flour, 2 parts liquid, 1 part egg, ½ part butter

Sponge cake: 1 part egg, 1 part sugar, 1 part flour, 1 part butter

Muffin: 2 parts flour, 2 parts liquid, 1 part egg, 1 part butter

Slurry (to thicken soups and sauces): 1 part cornstarch, 1 part water (by volume)

Chocolate sauce: 1 part chocolate, 1 part cream